Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was ...
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Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was criticised for its lack of attention to capitalism and liberal governmentality, and it was argued that he ignored the problem of political action. Issues of economy and political praxis have become even more urgent for critical theory over the past decade as it has confronted the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and an increasingly turbulent and populist politics. Agamben and Radical Politics suggests that Agamben’s work retains its urgency for understanding the issues that underpin the politics of our time. It does so by focusing on his recent work on the theological history of economy, his account of a non-sovereign politics, and his longstanding engagement with the revolutionary tradition. The book includes a newly translated essay by Agamben, entitled ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ and ten chapters that critically engage with him on issues including the genealogy of economy, the practices of monasticism and use, temporality and historical method, and his relationship to Marxism and anarchism. The volume sheds new light on Agamben’s work by focusing on his treatment of economy and poitical action and, through this, opens up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in an age of financial crisis and political revolts.Less

Agamben and Radical Politics

Published in print: 2016-07-01

Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was criticised for its lack of attention to capitalism and liberal governmentality, and it was argued that he ignored the problem of political action. Issues of economy and political praxis have become even more urgent for critical theory over the past decade as it has confronted the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and an increasingly turbulent and populist politics. Agamben and Radical Politics suggests that Agamben’s work retains its urgency for understanding the issues that underpin the politics of our time. It does so by focusing on his recent work on the theological history of economy, his account of a non-sovereign politics, and his longstanding engagement with the revolutionary tradition. The book includes a newly translated essay by Agamben, entitled ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ and ten chapters that critically engage with him on issues including the genealogy of economy, the practices of monasticism and use, temporality and historical method, and his relationship to Marxism and anarchism. The volume sheds new light on Agamben’s work by focusing on his treatment of economy and poitical action and, through this, opens up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in an age of financial crisis and political revolts.

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its ...
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Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its practices of performative mourning for the abjected other. This agonistic mourning involves standing still in public, wearing black, and holding vigils to acknowledge the victims of the “other side.” In performatively occupying the position of the internal enemy, these political actors respond to those estranged as external enemies. By re-positioning their political bodies at the centre of the polis as a means of embodying their own and others’ ambivalent and precarious belonging vis-à-vis its demarcation lines, the activists bring intolerable memories into public view. Hence, they actualize the multilayered modalities of stasis as standing still but also taking the stand as embodied traces of those who had been stripped of their capacity to testify within the nationalist and militarist banality that led to ethno-nationalist violence in what has become the former Yugoslavia. In commemorating those socially instituted as impossible to commemorate, and in upsetting the grounds of mourning as a founding scene of maternal properness in nationalism, these dissident political subjects contest the idealized mourning inscribed in the genealogies of biopolitical normalization and ethno-national militarism. The book addresses agonistic mourning as a critical practice of contesting the power assemblage of sovereignty, biopolitics and nationalism.Less

Agonistic Mourning : Political Dissidence and the Women in Black

Athena Athanasiou

Published in print: 2017-07-01

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its practices of performative mourning for the abjected other. This agonistic mourning involves standing still in public, wearing black, and holding vigils to acknowledge the victims of the “other side.” In performatively occupying the position of the internal enemy, these political actors respond to those estranged as external enemies. By re-positioning their political bodies at the centre of the polis as a means of embodying their own and others’ ambivalent and precarious belonging vis-à-vis its demarcation lines, the activists bring intolerable memories into public view. Hence, they actualize the multilayered modalities of stasis as standing still but also taking the stand as embodied traces of those who had been stripped of their capacity to testify within the nationalist and militarist banality that led to ethno-nationalist violence in what has become the former Yugoslavia. In commemorating those socially instituted as impossible to commemorate, and in upsetting the grounds of mourning as a founding scene of maternal properness in nationalism, these dissident political subjects contest the idealized mourning inscribed in the genealogies of biopolitical normalization and ethno-national militarism. The book addresses agonistic mourning as a critical practice of contesting the power assemblage of sovereignty, biopolitics and nationalism.

The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign ...
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The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.Less

American Grand Strategy under Obama : Competing Discourses

Georg Löfflmann

Published in print: 2017-08-01

The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality ...
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Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.Less

Animalities : Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human

Published in print: 2017-07-01

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.

This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to ...
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This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Looking back in recent history through a series of seminal case studies culminating in Sadat’s dramatic assassination, this monograph explores whether, how and why the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in this region.
The story begins after the tripartite invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956 which triggered a ripple of ideological and geopolitical transformations that continue to shape the politics and borders of the modern Middle East. Revolutions swept across Syria, Iraq and Yemen; the three devastating Arab-Israeli wars ravaged the holy lands; and finally, a fraught and contested bilateral treaty bound Egypt and Israel to uneasy peace. The West and the Soviet Union vied for control over the Middle East’s destiny through its political centre, Egypt. The transition from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar el Sadat witnessed the decline of an ardently anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, supplanted by a radical quest to realign Egypt’s identity towards the Western world.
As revolutionary turmoil and conflict continue to unfold throughout the Middle East today, The Arab World and Western Intelligence is the untold story of how the British and American intelligence services have anticipated and reacted to crisis and upheaval in the region’s recent history.Less

The Arab World and Western Intelligence : Analysing the Middle East, 1956-1981

Dina Rezk

Published in print: 2017-07-01

This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Looking back in recent history through a series of seminal case studies culminating in Sadat’s dramatic assassination, this monograph explores whether, how and why the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in this region.
The story begins after the tripartite invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956 which triggered a ripple of ideological and geopolitical transformations that continue to shape the politics and borders of the modern Middle East. Revolutions swept across Syria, Iraq and Yemen; the three devastating Arab-Israeli wars ravaged the holy lands; and finally, a fraught and contested bilateral treaty bound Egypt and Israel to uneasy peace. The West and the Soviet Union vied for control over the Middle East’s destiny through its political centre, Egypt. The transition from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar el Sadat witnessed the decline of an ardently anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, supplanted by a radical quest to realign Egypt’s identity towards the Western world.
As revolutionary turmoil and conflict continue to unfold throughout the Middle East today, The Arab World and Western Intelligence is the untold story of how the British and American intelligence services have anticipated and reacted to crisis and upheaval in the region’s recent history.

Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the “border crossing” from one temporal or spatial territory into another, ...
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Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the “border crossing” from one temporal or spatial territory into another, Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film examines the way classic Russian texts have been altered to suit new cinematic environments. In these essays, international scholars examine how political and economic circumstances, from a shifting Soviet political landscape to the perceived demands of American and European markets, have played a crucial role in dictating how filmmakers transpose their cinematic hypertext into a new environment. Rather than focus on the degree of accuracy or fidelity with which these film adaptations address their originating texts, this collection explores the role of ideological, political, and other cultural pressures that can affect the transformation of literary narratives into cinematic offerings.Less

Border Crossing : Russian Literature into Film

Published in print: 2016-04-01

Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the “border crossing” from one temporal or spatial territory into another, Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film examines the way classic Russian texts have been altered to suit new cinematic environments. In these essays, international scholars examine how political and economic circumstances, from a shifting Soviet political landscape to the perceived demands of American and European markets, have played a crucial role in dictating how filmmakers transpose their cinematic hypertext into a new environment. Rather than focus on the degree of accuracy or fidelity with which these film adaptations address their originating texts, this collection explores the role of ideological, political, and other cultural pressures that can affect the transformation of literary narratives into cinematic offerings.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. ...
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Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.Less

Chaste Value : Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage

Katherine Gillen

Published in print: 2017-08-01

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.

Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental ...
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Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.Less

Cheap Modernism : Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde

Lise Jaillant

Published in print: 2017-07-01

Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.

Why did Roman prosecutors typically accuse the defendant of multiple crimina, when in most standing criminal courts the punishment imposed on a guilty defendant was the same (typically “capital,” ...
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Why did Roman prosecutors typically accuse the defendant of multiple crimina, when in most standing criminal courts the punishment imposed on a guilty defendant was the same (typically “capital,” that is, a kind of exile), no matter how many charges were proven? The answer lies not in a failure to distinguish between legal charges leveled at the defendant and defamation of his character, but rather in a rhetorical strategy that made sense in light of what was legally necessary to obtain a conviction. The greater the number of charges, the more likely the jurors would be persuaded that the defendant had in some way violated the statute according to which the trial was being conducted. It is true that prosecutors typically argued that the defendant’s prior conduct made it plausible that he had committed the crimes with which he was charged, but in a way that, as much as possible, made his guilt on these particular charges seem likely, and defense patroni attempted to undermine the charges and the character defamation. This answer to the apparent contradiction between multiple charges and unitary punishment favors a moderate formalism over legal realism as the way to interpret Roman criminal trials.Less

Cicero's Law : Rethinking Roman Law of the Late Republic

Published in print: 2016-10-01

Why did Roman prosecutors typically accuse the defendant of multiple crimina, when in most standing criminal courts the punishment imposed on a guilty defendant was the same (typically “capital,” that is, a kind of exile), no matter how many charges were proven? The answer lies not in a failure to distinguish between legal charges leveled at the defendant and defamation of his character, but rather in a rhetorical strategy that made sense in light of what was legally necessary to obtain a conviction. The greater the number of charges, the more likely the jurors would be persuaded that the defendant had in some way violated the statute according to which the trial was being conducted. It is true that prosecutors typically argued that the defendant’s prior conduct made it plausible that he had committed the crimes with which he was charged, but in a way that, as much as possible, made his guilt on these particular charges seem likely, and defense patroni attempted to undermine the charges and the character defamation. This answer to the apparent contradiction between multiple charges and unitary punishment favors a moderate formalism over legal realism as the way to interpret Roman criminal trials.

Bringing three key issues - Ozu, everyday life and the modern Japanese history - into a unified discussion, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro re-examines the renowned film director Ozu Yasujiro and his ...
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Bringing three key issues - Ozu, everyday life and the modern Japanese history - into a unified discussion, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro re-examines the renowned film director Ozu Yasujiro and his films from a socio-historical point of view to present a more contextualised contour of his cinema. The new approach will revise the previous tendency in Ozu studies that have emphasised Ozu's formal style, and articulate his consistent effort to explore the everyday life of ordinary Japanese people. The main subjects of this book include major issues of the history of Japan and Japanese cinema from prewar modernism and coming of sound cinema through struggles at war and during the US occupation, and the reconstruction and change of the postwar. It also emphasizes Ozu’s status and role as a studio director in Japanese film industry, with discussions of his generic contributions, such as shōshimin films, family melodrama, and bourgeois drama, which could be established under the constant conflict and negotiation with the studio Shochiku’s everyday realism. Upon this socio-historical context, the book attempts detailed reanalysis of Ozu's films throughout his career, centering on the multilateral aspect of the everyday in terms of space and time, produced through constant negotiation among different genders, classes and generations.Less

The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro : Histories of the Everyday

Woojeong Joo

Published in print: 2017-06-01

Bringing three key issues - Ozu, everyday life and the modern Japanese history - into a unified discussion, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro re-examines the renowned film director Ozu Yasujiro and his films from a socio-historical point of view to present a more contextualised contour of his cinema. The new approach will revise the previous tendency in Ozu studies that have emphasised Ozu's formal style, and articulate his consistent effort to explore the everyday life of ordinary Japanese people. The main subjects of this book include major issues of the history of Japan and Japanese cinema from prewar modernism and coming of sound cinema through struggles at war and during the US occupation, and the reconstruction and change of the postwar. It also emphasizes Ozu’s status and role as a studio director in Japanese film industry, with discussions of his generic contributions, such as shōshimin films, family melodrama, and bourgeois drama, which could be established under the constant conflict and negotiation with the studio Shochiku’s everyday realism. Upon this socio-historical context, the book attempts detailed reanalysis of Ozu's films throughout his career, centering on the multilateral aspect of the everyday in terms of space and time, produced through constant negotiation among different genders, classes and generations.